In traditional computer systems, client-side operating systems are employed to manage relationships between users, software applications, and hardware within a client machine, as well as that resident upon a connected intranet. In most cases, files and other data are locally stored within the resident computer or upon the intranet. In order to search for data and/or applications, modern versions of operating systems can provide a graphical user interface for accessing the file systems. The operating system can render the user interface onto a monitor which enables a user to control the computer and to locate files and/or documents stored locally within the resident computer or network.
However, the conventional computing paradigm is beginning to shift as maintaining security, indexing data, and the like for each client device can be quite expensive. As network connectivity has continued to improve, it has become apparent that a more efficient computing model includes lightweight (e.g., inexpensive) clients that continuously communicate with third-party computing devices to achieve substantially similar end results when compared to the conventional computing paradigm. In accordance with this architecture, the third-party can provide a ‘cloud’ of devices and services, such that requests by several clients can simultaneously be serviced within the cloud without the user noticing any degradation in computing performance. To provide an understanding of the ‘cloud’ architecture of data, services and/or applications, one may refer to the architecture in which distributed websites are maintained and accessed via the Internet.
Conventional Internet-based search, in general, employs search engines that typically analyze alphanumeric search queries in order to return results (e.g., websites). To the extent that image or other non-textual data is incorporated into a search, it is often pretagged with metadata, for example, where items are manually pre-tagged with metadata corresponding to physical attributes of the visual item. In other words, traditional search engines often employ pre-indexed metadata in order to return website links in response to a search query.
In the case of the Internet, search engines agents, often referred to as spiders or crawlers, navigate websites in a methodical manner and retrieve information about sites. For example, a crawler can make a copy of all or a portion of websites and related information. The search engine then analyzes the content captured by one or more crawlers to determine how a page will be indexed. Some engines index all words on a website while others may only index terms associated with particular tags such as such for example: title, header or metatag(s). Crawlers must also periodically revisit webpages to detect and capture changes thereto since the previous indexing.
Once indexes are generated, they typically are assigned a ranking with respect to certain keywords, and stored in a database. A proprietary algorithm is often employed to evaluate the index for relevancy, for example, based on frequency and location of words on a webpage. A distinctive factor in performance amongst conventional search engines is the ranking algorithm respectively employed.
Upon entry of one or more keywords as a search query, the search engine retrieves indexed websites that match the query from the database, generates a snippet of text associated with each of the matching sites and displays the results to a user. The user can thereafter scroll through a plurality of returned sites to determine if the sites are related to interests of the user.